This blog is about using ICTs to develop climate change preparedness solutions built around Energy Internet and autonomous eVehicles

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Thursday, November 19, 2009

NCAR's new data center - an embarrassment to the climate community

NCAR's new data center - an embarrassment to the climate community

http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/nwsc/

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and its managing organization, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), is building a new supercomputing center in Wyoming. The current NCAR data center in Mesa has outgrown the facility's capacity, and a new facility that can accommodate future expansion is needed. The Wyoming facility will contain some of the world's most powerful supercomputers dedicated to improving scientific understanding of climate change, severe weather, air quality, and other vital atmospheric science and geoscience topics. The center will also house a premier data storage and archival facility that holds irreplaceable historical climate records and other information.

NCAR is probably the world’s premier research facility for undertaking climate modeling and research. So it is very bizarre that such an organization would undertake to build a new data center in a state where almost 100% of the electricity comes from coal fired generating plants. What is ever more outrageous is that one of the principal partners in the project, Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power is leading a campaign to stop cap and trade - http://www.cheyennelight.com/cap-and-trade/.

NCAR’s strategy to build a data center in Wyoming also highlights the ridiculousness and absurdity of claims to build an energy efficient data center with a low PUE in a LEED qualified building. These claims are meaningless when all of the electricity is coal generated. If NCAR was genuinely concerned about the environment a much smarter move would have been to locate the data center a few hundred kilometers west to Idaho where almost of the electricity is generated from hydro. Relocating to Idaho would do more for the environment than even the most stringent energy efficiency and LEED qualified buildings. It would also send an important message that new jobs and business opportunities are only going to occur in those jurisdictions that provide clean, renewable energy.

I suspect NCAR is being seduced to locate its new data center in Wyoming because of the low price of electricity that comes from coal fired plants. But that strategy may backfire on them as Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power claims that their electricity prices will increase 73% with cap and trade.

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About Me

Bill St. Arnaud is a R&E Network and Green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as the next generation research and education and Internet networks. He also works with clients to develop practical solutions to reduce GHG emissions such as free broadband and dynamiccharging of eVehicles (See http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/) . View my complete profile